Letter to Greenpeace about VUI's WebPage

Letter to GreenPeace:

If you have visited Virginia Uranium's website you will notice at the bottom of their webpage there are quotes from various individuals that fade in and out at short intervals.

One quote was attributed to Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace.

I found it odd that Greenpeace would be promoting uranium mining and milling in Virginia.

I wrote to inquire.

You'll appreciate the response.

Subject: Re: using Greenpeace as uranium mining advocate

Thank you for your email and interest in Greenpeace. I have below our official Patrick Moore statement. You can also go to out website www.greenepace.org and put his name in the search engine to read more. I hope this clarifies that Patrick Moore is not affiliated with Greenpeace and is not one of it's founders. Please feel free to email us back with any further questions. Have a great day.

Greenpeace Statement On Patrick MooreOctober 10, 2008

WASHINGTON — Patrick Moore often misrepresents himself in the media as an environmental “expert” or even an “environmentalist,” while offering ani-environmental opinions on a wide range of issues and taking a distinctly anti-environmental stance. He also exploits long-gone ties with Greenpeace to sell himself as a speaker and pro-corporate spokesperson, usually taking positions that Greenpeace opposes.

While it is true that Patrick Moore was a member of Greenpeace in the 1970s, in 1986 he abruptly turned his back on the very issues he once passionately defended. He claims he “saw the light” but what Moore really saw was an opportunity for financial gain. Since then he has gone from defender of the planet to a paid representative of corporate polluters.

Patrick Moore promotes such anti-environmental positions as clearcut logging, nuclear power, farmed salmon, PVC (vinyl) production, genetically engineered crops, and mining. Clients for his consulting services are a veritable Who’s Who of companies that Greenpeace has exposed for environmental misdeeds, including Monsanto, Weyerhaeuser, and BHP Minerals.

Moore’s claims run from the exaggerated to the outrageous to the downright false, including that “clear-cutting is good for forests” and Three Mile Island was actually “a success story” because the radiation from the partially melted core was contained. That is akin to saying “my car crash was a success because I only cracked my skull and didn’t die.”

By exploiting his former ties to Greenpeace, Moore portrays himself as a prodigal son who has seen the error of his ways. Unfortunately, the media – especially conservative media – give him a platform for his views, and often do so without mentioning the fact that he is a paid spokesperson for polluting companies.

The following provides a brief overview of Patrick Moore’s positions and his history of working for corporate polluters.

TRUTH V. FICTION ON PATRICK MOORE:

Patrick Moore claims he is an environmentalist and represents an independent scientific perspective on forest issues.

TRUTH: Moore was paid by the British Columbia Forest Alliance, an industry-front group set up by the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller (the same PR firm that represented Exxon after the Valdez oil spill and Union Carbide after the Bhopal chemical disaster). The BC Forest Alliance is funded primarily by the logging industry. He also has ties to other corporations including Monsanto and Weyerhaeuser.

According to Moore, logging is good for forests causing reforestation, not deforestation.

TRUTH: Webster's Dictionary defines deforestation as "the action or process of clearing of forests." The argument advanced by forest industry spin-doctors that clear-cutting "causes reforestation, not deforestation" is without basis in fact. It is like arguing that having a heart attack improves your health because of the medical treatment you receive afterwards.

According to Moore: “Forward-thinking environmentalists and scientists have made clear, technology has now progressed to the point where the activist fear mongering about the safety of nuclear energy bears no resemblance to reality.”

TRUTH:
- The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards (ACRS) concluded years ago that the lack of containment on Department of Energy (DOE) sponsored advanced nuclear reactor designs constituted a “major safety trade-off.”

- Patrick Moore has recently begun touting the “safety” of nuclear energy at the behest of the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), which is being bankrolled by the nuclear industry to promote nuclear energy as clean and safe energy. The public relations firm Hill & Knowlton has been hired to roll out a multi-million dollar campaign to repackage Moore’s propaganda to convince congressional leaders of public support for the building of new nuclear plants.

Hill and Knowlton are most well known for their public relations work defending the tobacco industry. The PR firm has also worked for industry interests to stall action to protect the ozone layer by executing “a carefully designed campaign attacking the science behind the ozone depletion and delaying government action for two years. This was enough time for DuPont to bring new, ozone-friendly chemicals to market.” Austin American Statesman, Cox News Service Jeff Nesmith June 26, 2005 http://www.statesman.com/search/content/insight/stories/06/26doubt.html

More information on Hill and Knowlton can be found at:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Hill_%26_Knowlton

Moore’s recent call that the U.S. should generate 60 percent of U.S. electricity from nuclear power is ludicrous. These plants are acknowledged by the federal government’s own National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States – commonly referred to as the 9/11 Commission – as terrorist targets. An accident or terrorist attack at a nuclear plant could result in thousands of near-term deaths from radiation exposure and hundreds of thousands of long-term deaths from cancer among individuals within only fifty miles of a nuclear plant.

His proposal not only fails to address the risk posed to the American public by our existing plants, but also fails to address the urgent issue of global warming. According to Dr. Bill Keepin, a physicist and energy consultant in the U.S., “given business-as-usual growth in energy demand, it appears that even an infeasibly massive global nuclear power programme could not reduce future emissions of carbon dioxide. To displace coal alone would require the construction of a new nuclear plant every two or three days for nearly four decades…in the United States, each dollar invested in efficiency displaces nearly seven times more carbon than a dollar invested in new nuclear power.”

According to Moore, “Three Mile Island was actually a success story in that the radiation from the partially melted core was contained.”

TRUTH:

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission estimates that 10 million curies of radiation were released into the environment by the Three Mile Island Meltdown. Expert witnesses in the TMI law suits estimated that 150 million curies escaped, because the containment at Three Mile Island was not leak tight and the NRC ignored many of the potential escape routes for the radiation.

Patrick Moore, a paid spokesman for the nuclear industry, frequently cites a long-ago affiliation with Greenpeace to gain legitimacy in the media. Several media outlets recently either stated or implied that Mr. Moore still represents Greenpeace, or failed to mention his current ties to the nuclear industry. This page contains all the information journalists need to accurately describe Mr. Moore and to judge his credibility. We’ve included some information below and have attached several recent articles about Mr. Moore.

Patrick Moore is a Paid Spokesperson for the Nuclear Industry

In April 2006, the Nuclear Energy Institute, the principal lobby for the nuclear industry, launched the Clean And Safe Energy Coalition and installed former Bush Administration EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman and Mr. Moore as its co-chairs. The Clean and Safe Energy Coalition was part of a public relations project spearheaded by the public relations giant Hill & Knowlton as part of its estimated $8 million contract with the nuclear industry.(1)

Patrick Moore Does Not Represent Greenpeace

For more than 20 years, Mr. Moore has been a paid spokesman for a variety of polluting industries, including the timber, mining, chemical and the aquaculture industries. Most of these industries hired Mr. Moore only after becoming the focus of a Greenpeace campaign to improve their environmental performance. Mr. Moore has now worked for polluters for far longer than he ever worked for Greenpeace. Greenpeace opposes the use of nuclear energy because it is a dangerous and expensive distraction from real solutions to climate change.

Patrick Moore Did Not Found Greenpeace

Patrick Moore frequently portrays himself as a founder or co-founder of Greenpeace, and many news outlets have repeated this characterization. Although Mr. Moore played a significant role in Greenpeace Canada for several years, he did not found Greenpeace. Phil Cotes, Irving Stowe, and Jim Bohlen founded Greenpeace in 1970. Patrick Moore applied for a berth on the Rainbow Warrior in March, 1971 after the organization had already been in existence for a year. A copy of his application letter and Greenpeace’s response are available here (PDF).

Patrick Moore Has Provided Inaccurate Information on Nuclear Power

In 2004, Mr. Moore published an article in the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) journal entitled “Nuclear Re-think.” According to Mr. Moore, “Three Mile Island was a success story. The concrete containment structure did as it was designed to do: it prevented radiation from escaping into the environment.”(2)

Contrary to Mr. Moore’s claim, the damaged reactor spewed radiation into the environment for days. It appears that Mr. Moore didn’t even bother to check his facts. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s fact sheet on Three Mile Island (TMI) acknowledges that the meltdown resulted in “a significant release of radiation…”(3)

Even the International Atomic Energy Agency, which published Mr. Moore’s article, acknowledges that the TMI meltdown released radiation into the surrounding community. As a result, the IAEA ranks the accident as a Level 5 on a scale of 7, an Accident With Wider Consequences. (Only Chernobyl & the Soviet nuclear waste tank explosion in 1957 rank worse than the Three Mile Island meltdown.)(4)

According to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 10 million curies of radiation escaped the damaged reactor core. However, nuclear engineers who reexamined the accident estimate that as much as 150 million curies of radiation may have escaped from the reactor.(5) The meltdown at Three Mile Island turned a multimillion dollar asset into a multibillion dollar liability overnight and helped seal the fate of nuclear power in the United States. To claim otherwise is nothing but public relations spin.

Unfortunately, Mr. Moore’s pro nuclear spin is not confined to the Three Mile Island meltdown. While praising the Bush Administration for rejecting the Kyoto Protocol(6), Moore promotes nuclear power as a solution to global warming because,“(i)t produces no harmful greenhouse gases…”(7)

However, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) already determined in 1999 that the Nuclear Energy Institute’s claims touting nuclear power’s supposed environmental benefits were misleading because it did not disclose the fact that the production of nuclear fuel produced greenhouse gases. The FTC concluded that NEI’s claims could not be substantiated, “(s)ince there is not yet any permanent disposal system for radioactive waste and since the process of uranium enrichment that fuels nuclear reactors emits greenhouse gases…”(8)

Patrick Moore’s Own Words

Consider Patrick Moore’s own words when considering his claims and those of the nuclear industry: “It should be remembered that there are employed in the nuclear industry some very high-powered public relations organizations. One can no more trust them to tell the truth about nuclear power than about which brand of toothpaste will result in the sexiest smile,”(9) he wrote before becoming a spokesman for polluters.

Vision, video, photos, report information
Jane Kochersperger, 202-319-2493

http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/press-center/releases2/greenpeace-statement-on-patric#